For the defense
Another principal figure in the Hendricks family murder case is no longer with us.
Hal Jennings, one of David Hendricks’s defense attorneys in his first murder trial, died this month, just short of his 85th birthday. He tried to retire 19 years ago. He failed.
In 1983, when Hendricks was accused of killing his wife and children, he turned to his business attorney who immediately recommended that Hendricks engage Jennings—then 43 years old and the community’s best-known and able criminal defense attorney. It was likely the highest profile case in Jennings’s long career.
Jennings was soft-spoken, his courtroom demeanor unhurried, attentive and respectful. His arguments before a judge or jury carried a patina of legitimacy and rationality that served his clients very well.
I covered every minute of Hendricks’s first trial—a nine week-long event 140 miles from his (and my) Bloomington, Ill., home. One day jurors and others were told they’d have the afternoon off for reasons I don’t recall. But I was grateful. The days were long and proceedings were intense. I was filing frequent reports for my employer, WJBC Radio, while also doing twice-daily updates for the Associated Press and United Press International. So after tying up some loose ends, I headed to a movie theater for a much-appreciated change of pace and chance to see a new and heralded film, “Amadeus” (now my all-time favorite movie).
I settled in with a box of popcorn, looked down the row of seats and there sat Hal Jennings. He, probably more than I, also needed a diversion.
Some days later, the jury convicted Hendricks and prosecutors sought the death penalty. Jennings was before the judge, arguing for his client’s life.
“It is my personal and abiding conviction that you, Judge, will join me in suggesting that what’s right and just in this case is not the death penalty. I do not believe that David Hendricks murdered his family. I do not believe the jury’s verdict was just. But above all, the death penalty is not in order because this man is not evil. By reason of his history, his family, his friends, his conduct, his relationship with Susie (his wife), his relationship with his kids, he is not an inherently evil man.”
The next day the judge sentenced Hendricks to spend the rest of his life in prison with no chance of parole.
Minutes later I interviewed Jennings. This is the way it went: Defense attorneys after Hendricks sentencing.
The chief prosecutor in the first trial, Ron Dozier, died five years ago at the age of 73. Hendricks, after more than seven years behind bars, was freed following a second trial ordered by the Illinois Supreme Court. He now lives in Florida with his fourth wife and two children. He is 71.
Surely not…
Christopher Browning is an emeritus professor at the University of North Carolina and author of a moment of clarity in May 29’s New York Review of Books.
In “Surely Not?” (https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2025/05/29/surely-not-manchurian-candidate-president/) Browning challenges us to think about what things an American president who is actually an agent of an enemy power would never do, instead steering wide of acting “so outrageously and preposterously as to blow his cover.”
“What are some of the things that even a Manchurian candidate would hesitate to do?” Browning asks. “What would be the limit of the self-inflicted wounds that he would dare to attempt?”
Then Browning lists about three dozen things that sound all too familiar. Some of them:
Surely an American president wouldn’t disparage NATO allies or target Canada (the longest nonmilitarized frontier in the world and our best trading partner) for absorption. He wouldn’t suggest a military seizure of Greenland and the Panama Canal, or an American occupation of Gaza.
He wouldn’t cut off aid to Ukraine, or “dare to launch a broad and untargeted tariff war on the entire world.” Eliminate USAID? Dismantle agencies that deal with health and weather threats? Cripple American economic vitality “by attacking the remarkable synergy of the university-government-philanthropy partnership that makes the U.S. a world leader in research?” Denigrate the rule of law and due process? Ban certain lawyers from federal buildings? Appoint people clearly unfit for the jobs to cabinet positions?
Browning concludes that “no foreign embedded Manchurian candidate would dare risk exposing himself by dropping such a cluster bomb of obviously and predictably damaging actions and policies all at once.”
In this month’s Atlantic, George Packer states the obvious: “It doesn’t matter whether Trump is an actual Russian asset; he’s already doing the work of one.”
About June 14th
Need I say it? I will not be celebrating Donald Trump’s birthday. Not by buying his cryptocurrency. Not by applauding his path toward a command economy with teeter-totter tariffs, toward dictatorial powers and monetization of the presidency. Not by acclaiming his transformation of our system of justice into a political tool. And certainly not by watching a strongman military parade march near the White House and Washington Monument on a day that has a serendipitous confluence of the U.S. Army’s 250th birthday, Flag Day and the Oval office occupant’s 79th birthday.
As a U.S. Army veteran, I feel empowered to find something else to observe that day.
Found it! June 14 is also National Cucumber Day.
But here’s something truly worth observing: The “big, beautiful bill” that makes possible immediate top-income tax breaks by an offsetting-but-less-immediate scaling back of social services important to millions.
If Democrats take control of Congress next year with a veto-proof majority, which seems possible, and especially if Democrats win the White House in 2028, those social service curtailments will almost certainly be reversed. The “savings” will evaporate, the uber-wealthy will already have benefited, the deficit will climb even more and the Medicare and Social Security funding crisis will loom even closer and more difficult to solve.
Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reports, it now costs $1 million to join Trump’s Mar-a-Largo resort in Florida.
Harvard hard
I had just emerged from my vehicle at a big box store when a guy in the passenger seat of a pickup truck moving too fast through the parking area leaned out of the window and yelled at me: “Hey, old man! You better get movin’…”
That much I know I heard correctly, and I’m only about 80 percent sure I got the rest right because my hearing’s bad and the pickup truck was loud. But I think the rest of his taunting statement was, “…because we’re out to get ya!”
The pickup roared away and I stood there for a moment—dumbfounded, trying to make sense of it. Then I realized it must have been my boldly emblazoned Harvard sweatshirt that had ignited his flamethrowing.
I admit I was wearing it as a political statement. Trump had just threatened to stop Harvard from admitting foreign students. That came not long after he had demanded changes in the school’s hiring and admissions policies and talked about suspending its tax-free status and research grants.
I don’t wear the Harvard shirt much. I bought it more than a decade ago when we visited Cambridge to see our nephew play in the Harvard-Yale football classic. I’m more inclined to sometimes wear a shirt or hat linking me to Illinois Wesleyan and Northwestern, my true collegiate underpinnings.
But on this day I decided Harvard was the right look and message.
I really don’t know what to say about a situation where, assuming I’m correct, my sartorial selection caused a guy with a backward baseball cap to yell a kind of warning at this old man. (I admit he had that part right.)
I wish free speech meant reasoned speech. Even so, if I had a chance to engage the passing ranter in dialogue, I’m not sure I’d know where to start.
Mistakes were made
I picked up Ed Helms’s new book, SNAFU, partly because he was an important part of one of my all-time TV favorites, “The Office,” but mostly because his book is similar to one I was going to attempt years ago.
My premise was to identify the 25 most egregious screw-ups in American history and write about how they came about. I was drawn to the broad topic by initial problems with the Hubble Space Telescope. Early news reports said one of its mirrors had been installed upside-down. Turned out that wasn’t true. Human error was involved—but nothing so dramatic as upside-downism. Space-walkers fixed the problem, giving us remarkable images of the universe for longer than anyone ever expected.
So my project stalled. Helms’s succeeds, mostly.
Some of his book is about bad ideas and bizarre plans never implemented. Like a U.S. plan in 1958 to detonate an atomic bomb on the moon’s surface to show a post-Sputnik world who really dominated space.
But then there are actual SNAFUs, “epic blunders that unravel like slow-motion train wrecks, except it’s like ten different trains derailing in every direction, with clueless officials insisting ‘Everything’s fine!’ while entire towns get leveled in chaos.”
Because someone hit the wrong button one Saturday morning seven years ago, a message showed up on Hawaii TV and phones, saying “The U.S. Pacific Command has detected a missile threat to Hawaii. A missile may impact on land or sea within minutes. This is not a drill.”
There’s the $125 million craft sent to orbit Mars that instead plowed into the Martian surface because someone forgot to convert meters to feet. And how about the “worst breach of U.S. military computers in history” that occurred because someone found a flash drive in the dirt outside his vehicle in an unnamed Middle East country and plugged it into his Pentagon laptop to see what was on it.
Want some insight into American interests in Greenland? Read Helms’s account of how Denmark looked the other way in the 1960s when the U.S. advanced plans to station 600 nuclear missiles there.
Big Claw
One of Helms’s stories brought to mind a personal SNAFU that occurred when I was associated with WJBC.
Helms writes about a newspaper that was out $10,000 because someone from Australia met its challenge of producing a bona fide piece of Skylab, an 85-ton orbital platform that fell from space in 1979.
My problematic challenge was closer to earth.
For several weeks radio listeners south of the city reported seeing a huge bird—a wingspan of 20 feet, some people said. Others swore it was part-reptile, part-avian.
Imaginations soared. What could it be? Some prehistoric species? We had our own “Big Foot.”
We called it “Big Claw.”
It was also county fair time. So at the radio station’s fair tent, we installed a large cage and a sign that said we’d pay $1,000 to anyone who could bring in “Big Claw.”
The promotion lasted about one day. That’s when someone from the state conservation department stopped by to inform me that what we were doing could be considered “commercial and harmful exploitation of wildlife,” a criminal offense that carried a fine of $25,000 and five years in prison.
We took down the sign, removed the cage and ceased chirping about “Big Claw.”
Vatican vibes
Imagine the glee when word went out in Wrigleyville that the new pope is a Cubs fan.
Imagine the disappointment when it was revealed that Leo XIV’s actually a life-long White Sox fan.
That doesn’t mean he hasn’t been to games in Wrigley Field. I bet he has.
It’s been fun watching various entities try to latch on to a little papal fame. There’s the guy who discovered that the three-bedroom home he owns in a south Chicago suburb is where the pope grew up. The Dalton, Ill., house was on the market, then taken off, then put on the auction block with a June 18 closing. Now the town says it plans to acquire it through eminent domain.
There’s the pizza restaurant that claims it’s the pope’s favorite and that he visited there less than a year ago. New on the menu? Pope-a-roni pizza.
A hot dog stand had this on its marquee: "Canes nostros ipse comedit,” (Latin for something like “He’s eaten our dogs.”)
The church building where the pope-to-be attended (and celebrated) Mass now stands vacant. That won’t last.
Pope Leo’s parents still lived in Dalton when my Reasonable Doubt was first published. They surely gave the book to him as a gift at some point, don’t you think?
I just feel it’d be a miracle if he hasn’t read it.
Thank YOU for reading!
Christopher Browning's book shows the power of counterfactual thinking. A "What if...?" question can be revealing, especially when acts/statements are so extreme that in a normal world they would make no sense. A good thought process.